Archive for the ‘broadcast’ Category

I recently came across a handy script for recording streams. It was in the scripting language python. So I went to obtain it. So far no problem.

But that got me thinking: I’d read somewhere a long time ago of python, or was it ruby (on rails or otherwise), being used to support broadcast or film digital production workflows. So first I wanted to confirm that, through web-search. Then second I wanted to compare the languages, to see which one I felt best about.

This is a really good article, I can see that for me, python is the obvious choice – more readable to me. Furthermore:

Ruby’s greatest strength is its amazing flexibility. There is a lot of “magic” in ruby and sometimes it is dark magic. Python intentionally has minimal magic. It’s greatest strengths are the best practices it enforces across its community. These practices make Python very readable across different projects; they ensure high quality documentation; they make the standard library kick ass.

(For a particulat given simple example, <<The python example is far more readable and maintainable. >>

On the other hand (in favour of ruby):

If ruby reminds of perl, your eyes do not deceive you. In many ways it is the love child of perl and smalltalk.

In the past have had a very good experience of using smalltalk

every large program should have its own internal DSL suited to the problem space … it seems much easier to create DSL’s (Domain Specific Languages). Ruby certainly spawns DSLs with much greater frequency than python. No single pythonic build tool dominates the problem space like rake does in the ruby community. Most python projects seems to use setup.py for administrative tasks even though that is not its explicit purpose.